Philadelphia

views updated

PHILADELPHIA

Philadelphia was founded by William Penn in 1681 as the seat of government for Pennsylvania, the colony that had been granted to him by King Charles II. Penn hoped to provide a haven for fellow members of the Society of Friends, otherwise known as the Quakers. The Friends left their mark on America in many ways, but none perhaps was so great as the heritage of tolerance signified by the name Philadelphia, which means "City of Brotherly Love." The city's reputation for tolerance made it the perfect location for the cultural, as well as geographic, center of what would one day become the United States.

trade

The key to Philadelphia's phenomenal growth lay in trade. Dozens of charters for new cities were written in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but Philadelphia was uniquely situated to take advantage of a growing economic boom in export flour. Delaware Valley farms produced two wheat harvests a year. Unlike tobacco, another major export of the colonies that was shipped in its raw form and finished abroad, wheat was milled into the final product, flour, at hundreds of watermills scattered around the countryside. Barrels of flour arrived in Philadelphia by cart from as far south as Virginia and on small, flat-bottomed boats called shallops from Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.

Flour barrels reexported from Philadelphia had the added advantage of being literally branded as proof that Pennsylvania stood behind the quality of the flour inside. By the end of the colonial period, the government of Pennsylvania recognized seven different grades, the highest called "super fine" and marketed to Europe. Pennsylvania flour was sold in the West Indies, South Carolina, the sugar islands of Madeira and the Azores, southwestern Europe, and even New England.

The city's most useful product was information at a time when information from overseas markets traveled no faster than a sailing ship. News of the best prices for export flour spread even before an incoming ship had completely docked. Merchants gathered at coffeehouses in the center of the city quickly put together "ventures" to send new shipments out to the most promising market. It did not take long for Philadelphia also to become a center for the reexport of manufactured products such as cloth that was sold first in the city's hinterland and eventually to coastal cities throughout America.

growth of the cities

From roughly 1720—around the time when Pennsylvania passed laws to certify the quality of export flour and print a local paper money supply—to the end of the century, Philadelphia grew rapidly. Influenced by the planned rebuilding of London after the

great fire in 1666, Penn had imagined a beautiful city with wide boulevards, attractive city parks, and rows of brick townhouses backing up to gardens and trees. The rapidly growing population, however, apparently wished to settle as near to the city's center at Second and Market Streets as was physically possible. Residents defied Penn's plans by crisscrossing the wide city blocks with alleys and spilling over the city's northern and southern boundaries into the suburbs of Southwark and Northern Liberties.

By 1790, forty-five thousand people lived in Philadelphia and the urbanized area around it, an area defined not by the rectangular plan of Penn's design, but rather by a semicircle two miles along the Delaware River and, at its widest point along Market Street, one mile west of the river. Warehouses crowded along the waterfront, along with tightly packed housing for tailors. Mariners stayed along the south border of the river, while the shipbuilding industry dominated the riverside to the north.

The city boasted over three hundred inns, taverns, and boardinghouses and five hundred shopkeepers and grocers. Scattered throughout the city and living in shacks along the alleys or on the top floors of sturdier buildings, common laborers (black as well as white) accounted for one in twelve city residents. The city's formal market ran the length of Market Street, which along with Second Street divided the city into identifiable sectors.

prominent philadelphians

The city had three hundred self-identified merchants, including seven who specialized in the Chinese trade alone. Twenty-five identified themselves as brokers or dealers, thirty-one specialized in the flour trade, twenty-four in lumber, eight in iron, and eight in tea. Young merchants tended to live in or near the

[Image not available for copyright reasons]

warehouses on the docks. The measure of success, however, was being able to move to the category of "gentleman" and live in Society Hill.

The enclosure of Dock Street, previously a foul-smelling open sewer, created a boom in building for the upper class in an area still called Society Hill in the early twenty-first century. It was centered on its own smaller market on Second Street south of Market. Thomas Willing, Benjamin Chew, Samuel Powell, William Shippen, and Robert Wharton—all famous merchants in their day—lived on Third and Fourth Streets. Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Rush also lived nearby. Wealthy widows from the Mifflin, Wharton, Gilpin, Bartram, and Hamilton families were neighbors in this new wealthy enclave.

The role of Independence Hall on Fifth and Chestnut led other wealthy residents to begin to build finer houses along Market on the western outskirts of the city. The most notable of these new residences was that of financier Robert Morris at Fifth and Market Streets. Morris loaned his home to George Washington during the latter's two terms as president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson stayed in this neighborhood while writing the Declaration of Independence and later when he was in the new national government. New houses there and in Society Hill were built further apart than elsewhere, and so the wealthy could avoid the chaos that characterized other sections of town. When a household member was ill, for example, sawdust was spread over the cobblestones in front of the house to keep the area quiet. Even sawdust could not have shut out the din of overcrowded blocks through most areas of the city.

occupations

The majority of shopkeepers and artisans operated to the northwest of Society Hill, clustering along Market Street, on Second Street, and also on Sixth Street north of Market. Approximately sixty different types of shopkeepers operated in the block surrounding the permanent market, along with numerous artisans and some professionals.

The variety of occupations offers a glimpse of the complexity of the city in 1790. There were twenty-three ministers, five sextons, twenty-eight clerks, ninety-eight schoolmasters or mistresses, fourteen university professors, fifty-five physicians, twenty-four pharmacists, five midwifes, nine bleeders, three dentists, one dispensary, and a "doctress." Thirty-one manufacturers specialized in carriages, thirty-seven as printers, twenty-four as chandlers, twenty-three as potters, fifteen as watchmakers, ten as clock-makers, thirteen as bookbinders, and ten as brush-makers. There were also comb makers, plane makers, sieve makers, soap boilers, card makers, three umbrella makers, two whip makers, seven pump makers, seven millstone makers, two engine makers, four fan makers, three parchment makers, five engravers, and glassblowers, along with a chaise maker, wire cage maker, cane maker, whalebone cutter, and pottery wheel maker. Other manufacturers made musical, mathematical, and obstetrical instruments; cigars; organs; trunks; hair powder; and hanging paper.

The city had 54 barbers, 192 innkeepers, 110 boardinghouses, 249 shopkeepers, 44 tobacconists, and 61 hucksters. In addition to 153 blacksmiths and 30 ironmongers, the city was home to 18 nail-makers, 25 silversmiths, 16 tinsmiths, 10 coppersmiths, brass founders, typefounders, block makers, gunsmiths, goldsmiths, cutlers, pewterers, and a steelmaker, wire maker, file cutter, and button mold maker. There were 131 butchers, 117 bakers, 34 brewers, and 18 sugar bakers or refiners, along with cake bakers, pastry cooks, chocolate makers, hardtack bakers, a mustard maker, and a confectioner.

To the southwest of the homes of the wealthy arose a city-within-a-city, home to a growing number of free blacks and slaves who had escaped from southern states across the Pennsylvania border to safety. Dr. Israel Butterfield, the first known African American physician and a leader in the fight against yellow fever, lived here.

City restrictions against "noxious" occupations had forced the wholesale butcher trade into a region of its own, Spring Garden, between the Northern Liberties and Germantown. Tanners and ropemakers also lived and worked outside the city proper. Carpenters lived on the outskirts of the city next to the new homes being built.

Whereas it was rare in the countryside for a woman to continue maintaining her own household after widowhood, female-headed households accounted for 10 percent of the total in Philadelphia. Wealthy widows, or gentlewomen, lived in Society Hill or the older sections once occupied by the wealthy closer to the river. Widows and women identified by a specific trade lived along with other shopkeepers and artisans in the northwest. It was standard practice in both shopkeeping and artisanal households for women to keep the books (including Debbie Franklin, Benjamin's common-law wife). After the death of a husband, it was easier for a woman to continue shopkeeping, or even directing the labor of artisans, than continuing to operate a farm on her own. There were also trades such as midwifery, cake baker, and mantua maker that were run by women.

environment and institutions

The bulk of the city was crowded and noisy. At its most densely populated point, twenty-four-hundred people lived in a single city block in an era when houses could be constructed only to four stories in height. The poorest of residents squeezed into shanties along alleys in the rain, living outdoors when the weather permitted. The children of the middling and upper classes spent a lot of their time outdoors by choice; those of the lower classes ran in little packs through the streets. By the first decade of the new nation, the city had exceeded a safe rate of population density, leaving it vulnerable to the nation's first major outbreak of disease, a yellow fever epidemic.

By the 1790s Philadelphia had a university and a medical school; two banks; the nation's first fire departments, insurance companies, and free library; and Benjamin Franklin's American Philosophical Society—so named to signify the role of the city as the center of America, not just the Delaware Valley.

the declaration and the constitution

The city would become best known for the legislative hall, known as the State House, that was built in the 1730s and 1740s to house the colonial legislature. A bell on top, ordered by the governor, had the inscription "Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land." Because of Philadelphia's central location along the coast—and its noted inclusiveness with regard to religion and creed—the city became home to both Continental Congresses through most of their operation. The Declaration of Independence was written in Philadelphia, signed in the State House—which became Independence Hall—and read to the public for the first time on its steps.

When the loose confederation of nation-states that had successfully won independence from Great Britain began to fall apart after the war, a convention was called in 1787, again in Philadelphia, to write a stronger constitution that would create by peaceful means an effective centralized government. Pennsylvania was the second state to ratify the new Constitution. Ironically, Pennsylvania was also the center of a revolt against the document, ending in a compromise by which a Bill of Rights was appended as the first amendments to the Constitution.

in the new nation

Had Philadelphia remained the capital of the new United States, it might have become a city with the size and prominence of Paris, as many educated residents dreamed. However, during the Revolution a group of Pennsylvania militiamen had marched on the Continental Congress, then meeting in Philadelphia, requesting (rather forcefully) that they be paid. From a distance, the request seems perfectly reasonable—but the manner, which Congress found frightening, led instead to its move across the river into New Jersey for a time. When the convention convened in the same building to write the Constitution, members remembered that particular outburst and insisted that there be a separate district for the nation's government so that the real or imagined failings of the state government would not directly impact the workings of the new federal government.

When the Constitution was approved in 1788, the mechanics of Philadelphia mounted a grand parade, by their own accounts, down a street that would forever be known as Arch Street because of the construction of a triumphant arch just for the occasion. Each artisan specialty marched, often with an accompanying float, in honor of the new nation. The first national capital under the new Constitution was New York City, where George Washington was inaugurated as president in April 1789. The following year, however, the federal government moved to Philadelphia. Briefly, the economic, political, and social centers of the new nation were all in Philadelphia. However, the federal government moved south to the new District of Columbia in 1800 and New York City gained primacy in international finance and domestic trade in the nineteenth century, particularly after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.

The first decades of the nineteenth century were not easy for Philadelphia, but the city continued to grow nevertheless. Philadelphia merchants continued to prosper in the China and West Indies trade. The city also remained a reexporter to southern ports and, through New Orleans, parts of the Ohio River Valley. The old artisan system of master-journeyman-apprentice died out, but Philadelphia remained a center of specialized manufacture, particularly with regard to machinery and fabrics. The city was no longer the financial capital of the nation, but in a period where the major money supply came from private banks, the city did not lack for either banks or money. Finally, the city grew as a center of abolitionist thought, and as the northern terminus of the Underground Railroad, it drew slaves to the city-within-a-city of free blacks and to numerous surrounding rural African American settlements.

After an ill-fated effort to create its own Main Line Canal westward through the mountains, the city ceded the route to the newly created, private Pennsylvania Railroad, which by the 1850s would dominate inland railroad trade. In the 1840s German and Irish immigration through the port of Philadelphia led to renewed growth in the backcountry and provided a labor force of young adults willing to take on whatever work was necessary. The city's rebirth was not easy. Journeymen struggled to find a niche in the new world of wage labor, and nativist riots led to the establishment of the nation's first Catholic parochial school system. By 1850, however, the city was once again on the rise, a center of international and national trade as well as custom manufacturing in textiles and machinery. Philadelphia's particular gift then and in the future would be the ability to reshape itself as the nation changed around it.

bibliography

Bridenbaugh, Carl, and Jessica Bridenbaugh. Rebels and Gentlemen: Philadelphia in the Age of Franklin. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942.

Doerflinger, Thomas M. A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. Updated ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Jensen, Arthur L. The Maritime Commerce of Colonial Philadelphia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963.

Klepp, Susan E. Philadelphia in Transition: A Demographic History of the City and Its Occupational Groups, 1720–1830. New York: Garland, 1989.

Lapsansky, Emma Jones. Neighborhoods in Transition: William Penn's Dream and Urban Reality. New York: Garland, 1994.

Nash, Gary B. Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968.

Newman, Simon P. Embodied History: The Lives of the Poor in Early Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003.

Ryerson, Richard Alan. The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978.

Schweitzer, Mary M. Custom and Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

——. "The Spatial Organization of Federalist Philadelphia." Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1993): 31–57.

Smith, Billy G. The "Lower Sort": Philadelphia's Laboring People, 1750–1800. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Thompson, Peter. Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Tolles, Frederick Barnes. Meeting House and Counting House: The Quaker Merchants of Colonial Philadelphia, 1682–1763. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948.

Tully, Alan. William Penn's Legacy: Politics and Social Structure in Provincial Pennsylvania, 1726–1755. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Warner, Sam Bass, Jr. The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968.

Wulf, Karen A. Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000.

Mary Schweitzer

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation